


Stay

by amillionkilopascals



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 3am fics, Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Comfort/Angst, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Late Night Writing, M/M, first fic, how do i even do this, i am so sorry if this isn't up to standard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 10:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8441347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amillionkilopascals/pseuds/amillionkilopascals
Summary: It wasn't meant to be like this.In which Yuuri finally gets his first kiss with Viktor, albeit in a situation neither of them wants to be in.aka that car accident fic no one asked for





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mao (creme)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/creme/gifts).



> Hello!! This is the first fic I've actually completed, so I'm very lost and beta-less. Kindly give me feedback on my writing so I can improve and write better fics next time :33

  Stiff hospital garb scraped incessantly against the back of the young man’s neck, interspersing the regular, absentminded rhythm of tiny circles being rubbed across his hand and the feeble heat of tears bleeding into his skin in some kind of sick harmony. His eyes felt like they had been glued shut with resin, and by the time he had forced them open, his only reward was a dusty white ceiling and a quivering lump of bright matter just out of his peripheral vision. The man struggled to twist his neck in order to see more, but something snapped, sending tendrils of pain racing through his semi-conscious state.

 

If waking up felt like this, he wished he had stayed asleep.

 

The hand that had been holding his shifted, and another he hadn't known existed moved from his waist to cup his face. Then the tears stopped, and he nearly missed their warm wetness before a blurry face hauled itself into the space above him, dripping more onto his cheeks and sending tiny streams of salty water towards his chapped lips.

 

Lips.

 

His hand reached up subconsciously to brush his fingers across what looked like the mouth of the face, causing a strange tugging sensation in his torso that felt vaguely familiar.

 

It moved.

 

Yu--

 

 _Yuuri_ , it appeared to mouth.  _You’re awake._ Yuuri. Yuuri-- was that his name? What had it been? Who had he been?

 

Then the sound hit him as his body was enveloped by a wave of warmth and the face disappeared into the crisp pillow beside his head, arms tucked securely around his chest.

 

It was too much. The loud beeping of the dark green monitor next to him, the deafening whirring of air conditioning vents, the ear-splitting scream that danced feverishly around the room. It was painful. It was scary. It was--

 

“Shhhhh,” a small voice breathed shakily into his ear. “E-Everything’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.”

 

“Breathe.”

 

The man inhaled the air above him, warmed by the face only a few seconds ago. He felt it rush down his parched throat, run over the insides of his lungs, like a fresh river bursting into a canyon that hadn't seen water for thousands of years.

 

The screaming stopped, and the noise died down to soft huffs of breath.

 

“Yuuri.”

 

The voice pulled itself from his pillow back to a plane of vision impossible for him to see.

 

A deep breath.

 

“I’m going to move you a little, so you can drink some water. Tell me if it hurts.”

 

This voice sounded deeper and less wobbly than the previous one, but he could tell that the calm was forced. They belonged to the same person, the same person who stayed by his side in his sleep, who wove stories of the outside world into his dreams, who stained his wounds with his own bloody tears.

 

Wounds.

 

What happe-

 

The bed under him suddenly jerked upwards, eliciting a sharp gasp.

 

“Painful?”

 

The man-- Yuuri (?)-- shook his head, and the bed continued upwards until he could see the end of his bed. A glass of water came to his lips, and a hand wrapped around his own unstable fingers to steady him as he drank from it. He steadied the glass on his thighs just in case he got thirsty again.

 

“Yuuri.”

 

He attempted to turn his body a little, to see the faint smudge of a face he could barely see the outlines of. Two hands reached out to him, again, to place a pair of spectacles over his eyes. They were warm, trembling as they grazed his cheeks gently and he caught them.

 

When he looked up, he almost wished he hadn't.

 

The blurry colours of his person were now brought into sharp focus, revealing a face worn from the exhaustion of nights lost to sleepless worry and icy blue eyes rimmed scarlet from the hot tears spilling over its edges. Silver hair hastily finger-combed-- just for him, he realised-- caught stray rays of the late afternoon sun filtering through grey shutters behind the plastic chair his person was sitting in. He was pale. He was thin. He was beautiful. What had he done, to make such a beautiful person cry like this? What had Yuuri done?

 

He opened his mouth.

 

“I’m sorry,” his person whispered.

 

“I’m so sorry, Yuuri.”

 

Something about this voice, deep and weighed down by regret, awoke a sudden awareness in him. It didn't take long for him to whip the thin hospital blanket off his body and notice that something was missing.

 

His left shin.

 

“Where is it?” he managed to rasp. He felt stupid. He probably looked stupid, too. His fingers grasped the glass tightly, as if he could somehow squeeze his missing leg into existence.

 

“They--they offered me a choice. Leave it there and it had a seventy percent chance of rotting and a cancerous tumour developing near your patella. Amputate it, and you would recover two months faster. I chose-”

 

“-ah!”

 

The glass shattered, water and broken glass shards raining over the the places not already covered by tears.

 

Yuuri felt little pricks of pain and water gunning for a stab at his heart, but they were both vastly overwhelmed by a particular numbness that wrapped around his brain.

 

He remembered, now.

 

It was the same feeling he had felt just before falling asleep.

* * *

 

Except maybe the glass had hurt a little more.

 

The shrieking of heavy duty rubber tyres melting into faux leather scented with artificial Panama Breeze and blood the colour of rusted iron was nearly enough to send him careening off the edge of consciousness itself. Splinters of tempered glass and snapped windshield wipers cut deep into his skin, and the sickening angle his left leg was bent at only seemed to grow more and more unnatural with the increasing volume of noisy chatter swarming around the car.

 

 _This can’t be,_ he remembered thinking. _This can’t be happening to me._

 

Then he had turned and seen Viktor’s body stretched out over the steering wheel, crimson liquid pooling between teeth clenched in a last-ditch attempt to avoid the lorry coming at them.

 

“This is only a dream,” he had told Viktor’s limp form, told himself, as he tried desperately to shake him awake. “Wake up,” he had cried, as tears blurred his vision.

 

“Wake up,” he had murmured, as his strength abandoned him and he himself slipped into darkness.

* * *

And now Viktor was here, healthy, alive, and repeatedly pressing the button for medical assistance while trying to collect what he could of the glass shards with one hand. Yuuri wanted to laugh at the irony of the situation. In the end, no matter how much he wanted to make it on his own, to be the one protecting them, it had always been Viktor caring for him. Giving him confidence. Choreographing his performances. Meeting his every need. And he had given him nothing in return. It wasn't fair, not like this. It had never been fair.

 

“I-I’m sorry,” he stuttered out.

 

The unruly curtain of hair gave way to a well-sculpted face he now recognised as Viktor Nikiforov. His coach, idol, and now, maybe something more (or so he wished). His thin lips were parted in surprise, and a number of emotions seemed to cloud his eyes: concern, sorrow, confusion.

 

“For what?” he asked, and silence settled over the room like a thick fog.

 

“Everything.”

 

Yuuri exhaled, and the guilt accumulated in his lungs clung to his internal organs like cigarette smoke.

 

“I don't know if you realised this, but now that my shin is gone, I can't skate for the rest of my life. It was my last season and I can't even take part in the Grand Prix, much less win it. I’ve wasted your time-”

 

“Yuuri-”

 

“I’ve wasted all your time! Everything! You spent nearly a year with me and broke a long-term promise to your rink junior just to train a useless 23-year-old fuck who can't even ice-skate anymore! I-- I-”

 

The tears came hot and fast, and Yuuri had no chance to stop them before they fell on his lap, mixing with blood and glass to form some garish cocktail. It was so unfair, so, so unfair, that fate had to come back and taunt him this way. Maybe he should have given up after all. Maybe, then, he wouldn't be caught up in this mess.

 

A breath.

 

“Yuuri,” sighed a voice too velvety to be as rough as it currently sounded.

 

He felt something snap inside him, as if someone had cut the wire to his power supply and the current coursing through his veins just stopped.

 

“What?”

 

His voice came out high. Broken. Desperate for something, but nothing in particular. Nothing he could hope for, anyway.

He watched as Viktor gingerly swept all the remaining visible glass shards into a piece of tissue paper, which he placed on a bedside table laden with a basket of deep red roses addressed to Viktor Nikiforov.

 

Of course he still has fans, he realised. Even as a coach, Viktor was devilishly popular. His good looks and charisma continued to draw people to him, like moths to a flame. He could go out and coach another promising figure skater, leave him behind in the past to rot, to bleed, to die.

 

And he wouldn't ca-

 

His hands were suddenly held captive by one of Viktor’s, which busied itself cleaning off the pulverised glass bits stuck to his fingers using a moist handkerchief. Yuuri recognised it as the one he usually carried around in his pocket, rarely used for anything but added dramatic effect.

 

“You’re not a waste of my time.”

 

The hand holding the handkerchief was shaking, and it took Yuuri a while to realise Viktor was crying again.

 

“Please, please don't talk about yourself like that.”

 

Yuuri blinked.

 

“You mean more to me than just skating.

 

Sure, I first came to Hatetsu because you had talent. But very quickly, I learned that there was much more to you than talent. There was insecurity. There was determination. There was passion.

 

And you knew something that I had never truly known before. Love. Before you, love was just another name for using people. I loved Yakov, as a father, so he would let me do as I wish. I loved Yuri, as a brother, so he would forgive me for forgetting my promises. And I’ve loved countless other partners, as a celebrity, just to get my fix for one night.

 

But you're the first person in my life who’s wanted to love me as I am. All of me, with all of my quirks and faces and not just one of them.”

 

The hospital room was quiet, and Yuuri forced himself to breathe despite the uneven lurches his heart was experiencing.

 

“And maybe, somewhere in there, I learned how to love too. How to give you support where you caved in. How to push each other just over our limits, so both of us can grow. How to care for someone other than myself.”

 

He kept the neatly folded handkerchief next to the badly creased tissue paper on the bedside table, where glinting specks of glass gathered up the sunlight and shone with the intensity of a million dying stars. Yuuri was both mesmerised and blinded by them, but they faded into the washed-out background when Viktor took both his cut-up, bleeding hands in his own, covered with light scars.

 

These wounds, too, would fade with time.

 

“Я тебя люблю, Yuuri. I love you. 愛してる。 I’m not going anywhere.”

 

Yuuri intertwined their fingers together and brought Viktor’s hands to his neck-- a variation of the duet they had choreographed for the Grand Prix, now left forgotten by the peripheries of their thought processes.

 

“You-you’re staying,” he said, and the statement stayed hanging in the air between them for Viktor to swallow. They could feel the unsteady thumpthump-thump of each other's heartbeat through their fingertips, and the mixture of anxiety and anticipation buzzing in Yuuri’s gut threatened to materialise in the form of regurgitated stomach acid.

 

Viktor looked up, and for once his gaze wasn’t blocked by barriers, carefully calculated filters to extract the exact response he wanted from the opposite party. There was something in those eyes, some element of raw emotion hardly seen in Viktor, that made Yuuri want to drown in them.

 

“Right here,” he confirmed, and the eruption of relief that burst from Yuuri’s heart gave him enough courage to pull Viktor’s arms behind him and sigh happiness into his lips, now curved into a smile.

 

“May I?” he asked rather sheepishly, mouth already slotted together with Viktor’s.

 

Viktor hummed in reply, wrapping his arms around Yuuri’s waist to provide support. “Be careful of the glass,” he laughed softly, as he leaned in.

* * *

 

BONUS:

  Viktor laughed so hard that tears came rushing to his eyes in a way that made Yuuri want to slap him for all the trouble he caused.

 

Technically it had been his fault for over-reading things, but wasn't it basic etiquette to remove the delivery tag before presenting a gift to someone? What an ass.

 

“The flowers are for you, Yuuri-ka. I meant to use them to apologise and ask you out when you woke up, but you ended up breaking that cup and all, so…why do you ask?”

 

Apparently, the aforementioned ass hadn't sensed anything when asked about the dubious plantlife in the room. Before realisation hit, anyway.

 

“OhHhHHHHH, were you _jealous_? How cute of you, _Yuuuuri._ ”

 

The Viktor-proclaimed cutiepie dragged himself to the corner of the bed as far away from Viktor as possible to hide his face, which was currently about as red as beetroot ramen.

 

 _If the nurses hadn’t rid the entire room of sharp or breakable objects and taken away the glass splinters I would have thrown them in your face,_ he thought, sulking.

 

“Yuuuuri, what are you thinking about? You have the same look Makkachin gets when she wants more dog treats than what’s good for her~ Too many kisses when you’re recovering isn't healthy, you know? I’m a qualified instructor~~ But Yuuri, all you have to do is ask-”

 

“Nevermind,” Yuuri sighed as he shifted back to the centre of the bed and pressed the ‘down’ button so that he could lie down again. He turned to look the offending instructor in the eye, but it was practically impossible to actually look irritated without melting in the face of Viktor’s endearing nature.  “I--I wasn't asking for a kiss, just so you know. That wasn't accurate mind-reading.”

 

Viktor grinned and kissed him anyway.

 


End file.
